


remnants and empty reaching hands

by rosedusts



Category: Red Velvet (K-pop Band), SEVENTEEN (Band), TWICE (Band)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-01
Updated: 2018-06-01
Packaged: 2019-05-16 20:35:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14818409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosedusts/pseuds/rosedusts
Summary: they curl together like a question mark, both with a faraway song already gone  beating against their bones, waiting to be let go, but they don't know how to.both with hands reaching for remnants of a boy once, now a ghost. both with hands always coming up empty.





	remnants and empty reaching hands

**Author's Note:**

> originally posted on aff

1.

 

She closes her eyes, opens them, hopes to see him in front of her.

But he’s not there. He’s not anywhere. He’s still gone.

Seulgi closes her eyes again, this time more forceful, she doesn’t see complete darkness because the moon decides to burn ten times lighter that night, and it makes her angry, because how could the moon and the stars decide to still be light when he’s dead? When the boy with the kindest smiles and the happiest laughter is dead?

“Leave me alone, Wonwoo,” Her voice sounds tired, her heart feels tired. She doesn’t need to turn around to know that Wonwoo is still walking behind her.

It’s been like this for the past month. She’ll go to work after her classes for the day, and he will be there, inside the old bookstore with its dusty stories. And after she’s done with her shift and goes home, he will walk behind her, ten steps behind, always ten steps behind.

It’s like he’s waiting for her to finally crumble, like that one ancient church in their town, always crumbling like its body couldn’t stand time anymore. It’s like he wants to put his palms out when she does, palms out, broken pieces of her caught.

“Wonwoo.” Seulgi turns around, and even that takes her energy away. She tries to put pressure into her voice, but it still comes out weak, “Please. Just go home. I’m fine.”

He blinks. “You’re not.” He says it like it’s obvious, like she’s been wearing sadness as her cloak this past month. “This is the first time you’ve talked to me in two weeks.”

Seulgi looks away from him, up, up, the moon is still glowing and she’s still angry because it should be raining, there should be rainstorms because Jisoo died, rain on everyone’s hair and everyone’s hearts. But no, instead the moon grew a hundred times larger and the stars barely shed tears over his death.

“Here,” He’s not ten steps away now, more like three, enough for him to put a hand out. He’s offering her a flower. A tall white rose that looks ghastly in the moonlight. “It just started blooming the other day.”

Seulgi shakes her head and starts walking away, ignoring the ghastly rose and the lonely boy holding it. She wants to scream, wants to scream until the pity everyone feels for her goes away, all the whispers (poor girl, they were so in love, poor girl, how can she survive without him?), scream until the flowers stop growing, scream until her grief brings him back to life.

“Seulgi,” Wonwoo calls out, sadder and sadder and sadder.

“He’s dead, Wonwoo, okay? Jisoo’s dead! Of course I’m not fine! Of course I haven’t talked to anyone in weeks! What else was I supposed to do?”

She sees her words break him down, his little hopeful smile falls, the flower falls, shoulders fall. Seulgi walks closer to him, the fury so black inside her stops choking her and it fades into a giant cavity inside her chest.

This hollowness is worse than the anger at the world, because it resonates the fact that he’s dead, over and over again, until she can’t run away from it, until she’s forced to live a life where she’s here and he isn’t, a life where she’ll always live with a heavy bruise on her heart.

Seulgi bends down to pick up the flower that Wonwoo probably grew himself, the one that just started blooming in the midst of all this melancholy in their lives. “I’m sorry.” She says, softer.

“I lost him too, Seulgi,” He says, turns around, then leaves.

Maybe this is the way it’s supposed to be: Kang Seulgi, always left behind.

 

 

 

2.

 

He still comes to the bookstore the next day, and unlike the previous days, she’s relieved to see him sitting on the giant stacks of books while thumbing another book in his hand.

Wonwoo looks up when she closes the timeworn wooden door, smiles, then goes back reading.

Inside the bookstore everything sounds muted, the town outside is on pause, people stop midsentence, halfway through a laugh, halfway through a sob, halfway through a heartbreak. The planet stops its rotation and for once stops trying to chase the sun. Everything stills.

The owner, an old man who constantly smells like old books, nods at her. “Look alive, girl. Lots of books for you to feel better. Pick one and read.” He tells her, but it sounds like a command.

Seulgi shakes her head. She’s been idling around for the past month and feels bad that she hasn’t been really working. “I’m good. I’ll just reorganize some of the shelves.”

She goes to do just that. Wonwoo follows her and sits down on the floor beside her feet. For a while neither of them says anything.

Two people have come and gone, one was a girl wearing a high school uniform and she went home with five paperbacks inside her bag, another one was a boy with the same uniform pretending to read a nonfiction when he was actually just stealing glances at the girl.

Seulgi smiled for the first time that day watching the pair of them. Wonwoo smiled watching her smile. And then reality punched her in the stomach and she felt like crying again. Jisoo is dead. Jisoo is dead.

It’s a few hours later when the sky has gone to oranges and reds and purples when the store closes and she says her goodbye to the owner and walks home. She doesn’t need to look to see if he’s following her because by now his presence has its own sense, like a new heartbeat, a completely new sound.

When she reaches the gate to her house, she looks back. He’s leaning against a tree, the same book in hand.

Looking at him feels a lot like looking at an open wound, raw and bleeding and tender. Wonwoo feels like a reminder of Jisoo’s death, but also a reminder of Jisoo as a breathing, living person. They were best friends. Never one without the other. Never even half without the other. How is he coping with most of him gone forever?

Their eyes meet. And she thinks he feels the same way about her.

And she knows why he’s always been here for her these past weeks, hovering, waiting. She looks up to the red sky. The whole world looks too vast right now, vast and livid and inconsolable, like the damage done on her heart and in front of her right now, ten steps away, is the only person who understands.

The sky looks this endless and their bruises are this perpetual and Seulgi and Wonwoo are the loneliest people on earth.

 

 

 

3.

 

Jisoo died. Seulgi, Seulgi, stand up, please stand up. It was a car crash. He was probably singing along to some upbeat pop song and then the next second a car collided into his. Like a comet, out of orbit, always destroying lives. The driver was drunk. His heart was beating and then the next second it stopped. Seulgi, please, just hold onto me. Wonwoo’s voice, tortured and kind. Hold onto me.

She wakes up, drenched in cold sweat, dull pain pounds somewhere inside her chest, somewhere her heart should be.

Seulgi sits up, sees that it’s still four in the morning, realizes that she doesn’t know who to run to. Her mother would fret and worry and be agonized if she knew how her daughter is crumbling in the eyes of death. She’s not one for friends, always comfortable with the silence that used to surround her and Jisoo.

She doesn’t think before she calls Wonwoo.

He answers after the third ring, deep voice even deeper with sleep, “Seulgi?” One word, questioning and afraid, as if dealing with a soft animal.

“He’s dead. He’s dead, Wonwoo. He isn’t here. He isn’t here. How are we going to go on without Jisoo?”

Wonwoo doesn’t say anything, she can barely hear him breathe, she knows she’s hurting him but she doesn’t want to feel hurt all by herself so she doesn’t stop. She doesn’t stop.

“He never finished his song. He was writing me a song, remember? He said it only needed some last touches. But he never finished it, he never will now.” God, she should stop talking. She should stop stabbing Wonwoo in the heart. “That book he was reading. His bookmark is still in there. It will forever be on page one hundred and twenty. It will never move forward.”

“Seulgi, please,” He whispers, scarcely a whisper, it’s the bleakest sound she’s ever heard, he sounds like he’s too sad to be alive. “Please stop.”

And then nothing.

Her shoulders sag like a broken doll’s and her fingers stop trembling. Her tired body is giving up on her. Her tired body just wants to go to rest, just wants warmth without black rivers running inside her.

“Are you there? Don’t go just yet.” Don’t leave me alone with dead eyes staring back at me in the dark, Jisoo’s voice still in my ears, echoes and echoes and echoes, she doesn’t say.

“I’m not going anywhere.” His voice isn’t an echo. Just a resolute promise that her fingers are clinging to. He’s not going anywhere. He’s not going to go with Seulgi on her purple knees, screaming the trees down, screaming her throat drained.

After some more moments of quiet, Wonwoo says, “Talk to me.”

She takes a deep breath, takes her thoughts away from Jisoo’s grave that some nights feels like it’s pushing her under, and asks, “How is your garden? It just started blooming, right?”

He starts talking, softly at first, almost shy, about the green plants and the other colored flowers. The ones that take the fastest to grow, longest to flourish, easiest to take care of. The ones that (hopefully, he says, if I’m doing everything right, he adds) will grow up to one foot by the end of spring. By the end of his rambling about his garden, his voice has grown animated, yellow as the sun, yellow as the flowers.

By the end of their phone call, Seulgi has smiled and laughed and smiled and felt like her old self, somehow, herself without death lurking in the shadows, without the sound of a car crash in her head.

It surprises her. This smile. This easy laugh. She didn’t know it could come only a phone call away. She didn’t know it would come only six weeks after Jisoo’s accident.

When Seulgi puts her phone down, the small happiness she felt trickles, trickles, trickles down the black river.

 

 

 

4.

 

A handful of lilac stems, his rosy smile prettier than the flowers in his grasp, the sun looking like it’s made of molten gold glowing on everyone’s faces. Seulgi’s hands itch, reminding her that it’s been almost two months since she last held a pencil and heard the sound of herself poured into the paper as she drew and created and sketched.

“Hey,” Wonwoo, no longer cerise and youthful, back to confused as his eyes follow her back retreating away from him.

His long legs catch up sooner than her liking.

Seulgi doesn’t look his way, pretends he’s not there, because pretense is the only way she survives these days. Pretends she’s okay enough to go to her classes, pretends she’s not one second away from tumbling over the edge, pretends a collision didn’t wreck Jisoo, pretends she doesn’t feel the soft wonder on her toes whenever Wonwoo is around.

“Look,” His eyes are still alight with hope. He’s walking backwards now, facing her, forcing her to take a look at his lilacs. “Look how purple they are. Aren’t they pretty? Smell them.” When Seulgi doesn’t do as he says, he stops walking, which makes her stop walking too, then puts the blooms right under her nose.

She does sniff them because she has no other choice. They smell sweet and innocent like a first love would smell like, if someone took a scope of spring and put it in a box it would smell like his lilacs, remind her of Wonwoo a lot actually, but she doesn’t say it out loud.

“I did a good job on these, didn’t I?”

“You’re such a nerd,” She mutters, can’t help herself. “Move out of the way, Wonwoo.”

“Is that a yes?” He moves out of the way, rosy smile on his face once again, rosy smile weakens her knees once again. “Of course that’s a yes.” He’s walking beside her now, completely uncaring of her glare. “Did you notice the lilac leaves? They’re shaped like hearts.”

“Huh, makes sense,” Seulgi comments.

“Why? Why does it make sense?”

She shrugs, hopes he doesn’t realize that she’s reddening. She can’t explain the reason why without giving away the fact that she thinks Jeon Wonwoo smells like lilacs, smells like spring tied and put in a box, sweet and innocent like first kisses and first loves.

He doesn’t push the matter further, thankfully.

 

 

 

5.

 

Seulgi and Jisoo had been friends ever since he helped her climb down a hundred year old tree near his house when they were five. Seulgi had managed to mount the tree without an accident, but then she realized she couldn’t get down, scraped her knees on the bark and bleed and cried out for her mother. Jisoo, in Seulgi’s five-year-old mind, had come on a white horse and a knight attire to help her down.

He and Wonwoo had been friends for longer than that, before Seulgi with her scratched knees and tearful eyes barged into Jisoo’s life. But Seulgi and Wonwoo never really became friends, the only things they had going on were their mutual adoration toward Jisoo and books.

Sometimes they even competed each other for Jisoo’s attention. But as they grew up, the competition died down and they learned to live with each other, Jisoo in the middle, her on the right and him on the left, but never without Jisoo.

When Jisoo and Seulgi were seven years old they promised they would marry each other in twenty years. Seulgi said she didn’t want to marry in twenty years. Jisoo said he’d wait for her. What if you have to wait for fifty years, Jisoo? She remembers asking. He said fifty, one hundred, one thousand years wouldn’t matter. He’d wait for her. Seulgi put out a honey covered little finger, challenging him to pinky swear. Jisoo did.

She remembers the serenity on his face, even at such a young age, mindful and calm and sincere.

Seulgi wants to scream, up to the heavens, up to the birds, up to the clouds and the stars. She wants to scream up at Jisoo.

But what comes out of her weary lips is a painful whisper, “You broke your promise. You said you’d wait. Twenty years, fifty, one hundred, one thousand.” She curls, makes herself feel as small as possible on the cold floor of her bedroom. “Jisoo. You died and broke your promise. You died before we even reached twenty.”

 

 

 

6.

 

“Wonwoo?” Seulgi finds dread climbing up her chest.

He doesn’t turn around, still crouched on the grass, back on her, head bowed.

When she bends her knees down beside him, she sees him holding something in the cup of his palms. A dead bird. Tiny droplets of blood on the feathers, on his skin. Seulgi can’t catch her breath.

“What happened? Tell me what’s wrong.” But she knows everything in their lives is wrong, upside down, like someone just blew up the horizon while they were peacefully sleeping and when they woke up, nothing was tangible anymore.

Wonwoo faces her, and the look on his face staggers her back, because she’s never seen someone living look this defeated.

“Someone shot it.” His voice is more hollowed than a galaxy without stars, just a black interminable void without fire. Wonwoo puts the dead winged creature down to the grass of his garden. “I tried to keep it alive.”

Her heart breaks, she didn’t think it could do any more breaking but here it is, surprising her with the fresh pain.

Seulgi remembers when they were six or seven, she found Wonwoo on the sidewalk, sitting on his heels, tears in his eyes. She had asked what happened. He’d showed her a dying bee on the back of his palm. He had tried to salvage it too but he was six or seven and he didn’t know what to do so the bee died and he cried some more.

And here he is now, years and years later, still the same young boy with the aching heart wide enough to shadow the whole universe.

“I couldn’t save anything.” He whispers. “I couldn’t save him too.”

Seulgi’s heart keeps breaking and she’s letting it break as she wraps her arms around him, her forehead on his shoulder.

“Who am I kidding. I can’t even keep myself standing these days.”

Seulgi promises herself that she will never let Wonwoo slip out of her fingers like these wounded animals and a dead boy that he keeps reaching out to (always coming up holding desolation), like that one part of the sky that always leaks into different colors, into darker colors.

She pulls him closer, murmurs things into his ear but also the same thing over and over again, you’re all right, you’re all right, you’re all right.

 

 

 

7.

 

Seulgi stops just as she raises a hand to wave at Wonwoo. Stops dead in her tracks. He’s not alone. Beside him stands Im Nayeon, all bunny teeth and joy, the girl is practically spilling laughter and life.

That thought hits Seulgi the hardest as she unconsciously compares herself to Nayeon, who has too much soul in one body, while Seulgi has most of her soul inside Jisoo’s coffin ten feet swallowed by the earth.

She steps back, soft wonder on toes gone. She had something she was about to tell Wonwoo. Some gardening idea, some book recommendation, a film she watched yesterday, she can’t remember now.

All she sees is Nayeon who’s made of sugar and honey and Wonwoo watching her feet dangling from the clouds with fascination.

“Seulgi!” His voice.

She can just tell that he’s smiling, that he’s been laughing. Seulgi scowls at herself for this ridiculous jealousy growing inside her. It’s good that he’s happy. It’s good that he’s found reasons to beam at. Why doesn’t it make her feel good?

“Hey.” She faces him. No, them. Nayeon is spilling happiness to the ground beside him, her smile is as big as the world. “I have to go. Work.” She lies, she doesn’t have work on Thursdays.

Wonwoo frowns. “No you don’t, silly,”

Damn him for memorizing her schedule by heart, she thinks.

Nayeon, without warning, pulls Seulgi into a tight hug. The kind of hug that no one gives to a stranger. Seulgi didn’t think Nayeon even knew her name. But here she is, making it even more impossible for Seulgi to stay jealous of her.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry about Jisoo.” She sounds so gentle and honest, she almost makes Seulgi cry.

Seulgi unstiffens. Nayeon pulls away, smile absent.

“Thank you.” She says and means it.

Her eyes meet Wonwoo’s.

If Seulgi listens closely, she thinks she can hear the evening wind’s sigh of disappointment, she thinks she can hear the rain despairing in some parts of the world, she thinks she can hear brittle twigs splinter similar to the splinter inside her chest.

At least one of them is given another chance at love.

Even after all of these ruins, even after Jisoo.

 

 

8.

Wonwoo stops coming to the bookstore.

The old man asks of him.

Seulgi puts on a smile, it lasts for two seconds, and says, “He found a girl.”

“Strange,” the old man mutters to himself, but doesn’t elaborate, so she doesn’t bring it up again.

 

 

 

9.

When the news of the crash reached to her, her first thoughts: no, he’s not gone, they’re lying, Wonwoo’s lying, how can he be gone? How can he be gone, how can he force a hand into my heart and shred it until it’s unrecognizable, how can he shoot me in the chest until ten bullets are stuck between my ribs, and yet I’m still breathing, still on my feet? How can Jisoo die and I’m not dead on the ground with him?

After that, she walked to the floor length mirror and said to her helpless reflection: My name is Seulgi. My name is Seulgi and my best friend died today. My name is Seulgi and I don’t know who I am without him.

When she thinks of Jisoo, even to this day, she thinks of him as her best friend, not boyfriend, not the great love of her life, because he was always a friend to her first, and then everything else came second.

Seulgi didn’t fall in love with him. She didn’t wake up one day and realize she loved him because the love was always there, both of them had always been aware of it.

She loved him.

She loved him as a boy and loves him as a ghost. But she was never in love with Jisoo.

 

 

 

10.

 

“What are you doing here?” She asks, her voice sounds all weird in her own ears, confused and glad and denying, her heart is beating all weird, jumping up and down she has to repress it, stop it from getting out of her chest through her mouth.

Wonwoo doesn’t answer. “Let me in, won’t you? It’s freezing.” His voice is still the same, timid and deep and sad.

Seulgi opens the window wider to let him climb in. The stars are cluttered on the sky tonight. There are a thousand of them and ten of the moons. Or maybe it’s her eyes playing tricks on her because there’s Wonwoo, standing inside her room, trembling and still so pretty.

“Hey. You’ll catch a cold.” He pushes her away from the window gently and closes it. When he turns to her, features only alight from the sky outside, he looks amused. “You do know the stars will still be there tomorrow night.”

Seulgi finds that strangely reassuring. “Isn’t that amazing? Every living being dies, but the stars won’t, they’re invincible.”

“Yeah sure, space nerd, sit down,” He laughs, short and breathless, motions to the place beside him on the edge of her unmade bed. It’s midnight. She was sleeping. She’s sleepy now.

She sits.

“Why are you here, Wonwoo?” Seulgi asks.

It’s been three weeks since they last had a proper conversation. Between spring break, work, assignments, Jisoo, and now Nayeon, she’s been avoiding him, or he’s been avoiding her, she can’t tell anymore.

Wonwoo shrugs. “I miss him. Seeing you helps.”

Her heart is not only jumping up and down now, it’s somersaulting, a freakin’ full-grown acrobat. Seulgi ignores it. But she thinks he notices it too, and doesn’t ignore it. He’s watching her. Seulgi ignores him, too.

She wants to say that seeing Wonwoo doesn’t help her, because he reminds her of his sunlight brimmed Nayeon and her sunlight brimmed smiles, he reminds her of the tiny tiny tiny crack she hears every time he’s around, he reminds her it’s only been four months since Jisoo, he reminds her that she can’t fall for him, not when death is still lying in wait inside her veins.

But when Seulgi glances at him, eyes so miserable they look almost blue, heart gone, blood not pumping, skin blue, the words wane and dwindle before they reach her throat.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been going to the bookstore.”

She’s the one who shrugs this time. “You didn’t really have to.”

Quiet. Quiet. Tick-tocks of the clock. Quiet.

And then, “How is Nayeon?”

“Good. Happy.”

“Of course she is.” Seulgi silently prays no one will touch Nayeon’s happiness.

She doesn’t know their full story, never really asked, because she doesn’t really want to know. But Nayeon has told her enough about it.

She bumped into Wonwoo outside campus one day. They talked about Jisoo, Nayeon told her how her first impression of him was that he’s crazy sad, how she’d never met anyone as unhappy as Wonwoo, so she tried for days and days to at least make him smile.

“And once he did, I was a goner,” Nayeon giggled, actually giggled. “When Wonwoo smiled, the skies above every part of the world turned into daylight.”

“Seulgi,” the boy who turns every part of the world into daylight is saying now, in the dark. Ironic, she thinks. He’s still watching her, the same blue on his eyes, frown on his pretty face, trying to figure her out, spread her mind and thoughts on the table and be able to read her like a map.

He won’t succeed. Seulgi can barely identify herself.

Seulgi looks away, because there are times when everything around her vision looks too much like a shipwreck and this is one of those times and she can’t handle any more sorrow.

She doesn’t realize she’s crying until she feels his cold thumb on her cheek, if she listens carefully she can hear the faint aloneness persistent alongside the pulse under his skin.

“Don’t cry, please don’t cry, don’t cry, I can’t take it,” Wonwoo is saying, repeating, and it’s only making her tears fall harder. Two thumbs on both cheeks now, the rest of his fingers on the back of her head, causing her to look up, straight into his eyes.

He looks agonized, palms and chest open wide in front of her, like he’s urging her to put all her pain inside his chest, on his palms, just pass it all to him.

When the tears stop, leaving her eyes red and face glistening, Wonwoo kisses her on top of her head and she wants to pull away, wants to say no, wants to say Jisoo, and Nayeon, and all the reasons why they can’t. But his lips on her hair, then on her forehead, then on her own lips, and she thinks she might be okay again, so she lets him.

They kiss and Seulgi chants inside her head: don’t fall, don’t trip and fall, don’t fall, there’s no beauty in collapsing into love, look at the dead eyes in the dark, the sound of a crash.

But Wonwoo is still kissing her, not at all sweet and innocent, greedy and hungry instead, trying to patch up their broken hearts with these kisses, with his mouth and teeth and tongue.

And she thinks: too late.

And she thinks: collapsed into love already.

 

 

 

11.

 

She wakes up.

Wonwoo is sitting on her bed beside her, seemingly has been awake the entire night. The sun hasn’t quite risen yet. He looks at her, waiting for her to explode or implode or both.

“You should leave.” Her voice sounds heartless.

“I should.”

Seulgi sits up, doesn’t glance his way, ignores the desperation on his face.

Ignores the desperation in his voice as he chokes out one word, “Seulgi,” she hates it hates it hates it when he calls her name, hates the fondness swelling inside her.

“Go. Just go. Please.” Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go.

After another minute of staring at her, he finally does.

Kang Seulgi, always left behind.

 

 

 

12.

 

“Will you leave me, Jisoo?”

“No.”

“You have to promise.”

“I promise.”

“What if the sea takes you under? Or the birds take you between the clouds?” Jisoo loved the sea and the clouds.

“You’ll have Wonwoo. When you both look at the sea and up to the clouds you’ll think of me. Won’t you?” He nudged Wonwoo, laying on the grass on his left. “Won’t you take care of her, Wonwoo? Love her as much as I do?”

Wonwoo blushed into the same shade as the pink hued roses but said nothing.

Seulgi was shaking her head, horrified. “No, no, no, no. Promise me you won’t leave me like my father did!”

“I won’t leave you like your father did, Seulgi, I promise.”

They both didn’t notice pink hued Wonwoo promising along under his breath.

They were eight. They hadn’t known that death never cared about promises, death has never given a fuck about the hopeless ones.


End file.
